Rendering- advice

Hey Guys,

I know there is 100’s of topics on here about “which is the best rendering software” and i know everyone has their preferences so is hard to pick “the best”. I have tried a few so far and havent had much success with any of them. I am a event planner and use sketch up to do set designs, so what I am ideally looking for is a render software which I can add additional lighting sources such as spot lights which is very common in my industry so projecting light rather than having a material as a light ‘‘glowing’’ in a way. I have tried… V-RAY (This is ok for rendering but limited with lights) Blender (OK) Brighter3D ( Prob my fave out of the lot but also found it hard to add spot lights) Does anyone on here have experience with set design, theater design or anything in the events industry. Would love some suggestions from you guys ! Failing that I will have to move over to WYSIWYG but i much prefer sketch up ! :cry:

Since you didn’t mention Thea … I’ve been using KerkyThea which is the free version of Thea Render. The lighting effects depend heavily on the render algorithm used … Thea provides several dozen to play with.

Will give it a try, what do you use sketch up to design ?

Mostly random stuff … here’s a dandelion rendered with KerkyThea:

The fuzzy part didn’t render well with the algorithm I used … the same model rendered like this with a different one:

That looks cool, heres something i did with brighter 3d, I managed to light up the LED panels but couldnt figure out how to add spot lights onto the stage etc

I’m not the best person to ask about stage renderings, but I downloaded a sample living room by “jaws” from the 3DWarehouse:

I added four spotlights, an oak floor, and radiance to the TV screen. A simple ray-tracing gives this result:

The “Metropolis Light Transport” algorithm takes into account ambient light reflection from the surrounding walls, but takes exponentially longer to arrive at a reasonable rendering. Here’s what I have after 42 iterations:

[added] Turning off the spotlights and using a photon map algorithm:

I like Kerkythea, too. I generally create “sets” for my models In SU before rendering.them. I think what you show is totally doable in KT.

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Cheers ! Well I shall download it today and give it a whirl ! Will let you know how i get on ! Thanks